


i sing into the wind

by heliantheae



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, F/F, Feelings, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, I am no man, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:48:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,906
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27504838
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heliantheae/pseuds/heliantheae
Summary: If she is alive, she is in danger. That is the life of a demigod, a soldier, and a woman. She knows—gods help her, she knows—iacta alea est,the die has been cast, and her lot in life is not one conducive to safety.Reyna is the one who ends up on Calypso's island.
Relationships: Calypso/Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano
Comments: 7
Kudos: 32





	i sing into the wind

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Suzanne Vega's "Calypso."
> 
> The content warning for sexual assault is re: Reyna and the pirates on Circe's island, but nothing happens on screen. 
> 
> Also, Scipio lives.

Reyna is going to die.

She has always known it, known that war and destruction and blood—and there is so much blood, it’s falling like rain over the wine-dark sea beneath them now—she knows that violence follows her. Her mother is the goddess of war, yes, but also of devastation, and if there is one thing Reyna inherited, it is the sick, heavy feeling that comes after a natural disaster. Reyna is dread and the bone-deep exhaustion, with none of the gratitude for survival to temper that particular gut punch.

Scipio shudders beneath her, his bay flanks painted red and gold as their blood mixes. She is trying to clean the worst of the gouges on his shoulder, but her hands are shaking badly. The pegasus groans as they begin to lose altitude. “No,” Reyna says. “No, please, you can do this.”

She looks down at the water far below and wonders, just for a moment, if Scipio would be able to make it to land if he weren’t carrying the weight of a demigod minus more blood than anyone really ought to lose. There’s no land in sight though, and the thought leaves her head as quickly as it had entered. Praetors never live long, fulfilling lives. Her retirement package is a funeral pyre. “I’m sorry,” she tells the pegasus. He tilts an ear back to listen to her, despite the pain. “I should have…”

What should she have done? What _could_ she have done? She was one woman, one girl, really, though she had never had the luxury of acting like it. She had been the best hope, the last hope of preventing a war between the two camps. They would never defeat Gaea if they tore each other apart first. Reconciliation was the only option that didn’t end in bloodshed, and here she is.

Failing.

Falling.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats.

She has killed innumerable monsters, people, demigods, and even her own father. The only time she ever really feels at ease is when she’s slipping a knife between someone’s ribs, and by failing this task, she is consigning hundreds, maybe millions to death. She regrets it. Failure is always regrettable, and so is death. That’s not a very Roman thought to be having in her final moments. More than all of that, more than anything though, she regrets letting Scipio down.

Her last thought before she blacks out is that maybe if the afterlife continues to exist after the world ends, she will finally find peace.

*****

Reyna wakes up, which is so unexpected that she slams her eyes shut again against the light. Then her brain engages, and she surges to her feet, drawing the knife hidden in her boot as she does so. If she is alive, she is in danger. That is the life of a demigod, a soldier, and a woman. She knows—gods help her, she knows— _iacta alea est,_ the die has been cast, and her lot in life is not one conducive to safety.

Moving had been a mistake. She has lived long enough to recognize the feeling of stitches tearing, and now her entire left side is on fire. She’s in a dwelling of some sort. It has earthen walls and windows without glass. Innocuous sunlight streams in. Herbs hang from the ceiling, drying for use in medicines or stews. The cot she had been lying on is clean, the linen sheets free of dirt and blood. She switches her knife to her left hand so she can press the right one against her freshly bleeding side, then cautiously pushes against one of the doors in the room. It swings open, and Reyna exhales relief into the bright light of day. She could have climbed out one of the windows, but the gashes on her side wouldn’t have appreciated.

She is in some sort of tropical paradise, she thinks at first. She would suspect it was Elysium, but she wouldn’t be in quite so much pain if she were dead. Scipio is there, munching contentedly on a patch of grass. His wounds have been stitched up neatly, and the smaller ones are healed completely. “Hey, boy,” Reyna says, hobbling over so she can stroke his velvety nose. “Are you okay?”

The pegasus snorts, then levels what she’s sure is a judgemental look at the blood soaking through her shirt.

“It’s fine,” Reyna assures him, then she collapses.

Scipio sighs, clearly wondering what he had done in a past life to warrant being stuck with her. Twitching his tail, he begins to trot away.

“Wait!” calls Reyna, trying to struggle to her feet.

She doesn’t manage it, but that’s alright because Scipio returns moments later, leading a slender woman in a white, Grecian style dress. Reyna is immediately reminded of Circe, which is unpleasant enough without considering the years between Circe’s island and Camp Jupiter. That was a dangerous direction for her thoughts to go, so she focuses on the scene in front of her. Reyna might not be able to stand, but she can certainly still wave her knife around. “Stay away from me,” she says.

The woman rolls her eyes. “Do you want to bleed to death?”

“I’m not going to bleed to death.”

“If you’re going to be stubborn, I’ll just wait until you pass out again and stitch you back up.”

“Fine,” says Reyna, her teeth gritted. “One wrong move—”

“And you’ll dice me up the way the gryphons did you?”

“I will.”

The woman doesn’t seem intimidated. Instead, she crouches by Reyna and peels the loose linen shirt she had been wearing away from her skin. “What’s your name?” she asks.

Reyna bites her tongue, partly because the remnants of the stitches had caught on the gauze of the bandage, and it hurt when they were pulled, partly because names have power, and she didn’t want to give this strange woman any over her. “Any particular reason you decided to crash land on my island?”

Reyna doesn’t answer that either.

“I’m Calypso,” the woman finally says, and something in her dark eyes looks tired.

“Greek,” Reyna says, her own exhaustion finally winning out. “Everywhere I go, always the Greeks.”

Calypso looks down at the tattoo on Reyna’s arm. “It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken to a Roman.”

Slowly, Reyna nods. She doesn’t want to talk, but it will help take her mind off of the feeling of thread moving through her skin. If she remembers her myths correctly, Calypso isn’t going to imprison her, enslave her, or cook her for breakfast. Reyna is no Odysseus. “My name is Reyna,” she tells the Titaness. “Praetor of the Twelfth Legion, daughter of Bellona.”

She begins to explain the series of events that had brought her here while Calypso tsks and mends her wounds.

*****

Time passes, or at least Reyna thinks it does. The island, which Calypso says is called Ogygia, distorts the days and nights until she’s not sure if it’s been a day, a week, or a month. It hasn’t been longer than that, she’s sure. Gaea would have swallowed the island whole. Her wounds heal, turning into raised, puffy lines of knotted scar tissue.

“They’ll fade,” Calypso assures her when she catches Reyna squinting at her reflection in Scipio’s water trough.

Reyna is no stranger to scars, so she only nods. She’s been in worse shape; it’s Scipio she worries for.

The pegasus still walks with a limp. Calypso might be a gifted sorceress and healer, but deep tissue damage is tricky, and horses, even those with wings, are delicate animals. He’s alright in the air, though he tires far more quickly than he used to. Reyna spends as much time with him as she can. She needs to leave this island, and that will mean leaving him behind. Calypso’s prison, Reyna’s salvation, whatever it is, it isn’t Jason Grace. It’s not the Athena Parthenos. Calypso, for all that she is beautiful and tragic, can’t heal the rift between the Greeks and the Romans.

“I need to leave,” she tells Calypso one day. “Will you take care of Scipio?”

The other woman doesn’t look up from braiding her caramel-colored hair. “You’re welcome to try. Go stand on the beach and ask Zeus—or Jupiter, whoever he is today—for a raft. It worked for the others.”

The others, the heroes who had abandoned Calypso over the millennia. Is the Titaness bitter that Reyna is about to do the same? Likely not, Reyna decides. Calypso has been kind, but nothing more. She might even be glad to see Reyna go, tired of running a halfway house for washed-up demigods. “Promise to take care of Scipio,” Reyna repeats stubbornly.

“I promise. On the River Styx, even.”

Thunder rolls. Zeus is listening, then. Reyna goes to the beach. White sand, seashells, and no raft no matter what she screams at the sky. It’s foolish, but she dives into the water. The waves wash her right back onto the beach before she makes it more than a dozen yards. She tries again and again with the same result, until she collapses in the sand, too tired and sore to move.

Calypso comes to sit by her. “What’s out there that you’re so eager to return to?” she asks. “Your family? Your legion?”

Reyna thinks about an Imperial gold sword lodging in what was left of her father’s spine. She thinks about Octavian’s constant scheming and about trying to keep the Twelfth Legion from collapsing in on itself. She thinks about the expression on Jason’s face while he watched Piper talk, about the way Percy had said Annabeth’s name, and about Venus’s words.

She knows she’s been silent long enough that Calypso isn’t expecting an answer. She gives her one anyway. “Nothing. Another fight. Another war. A funeral shroud if I’m lucky, the crows if I’m not.”

“More scars,” says Calypso, gently touching the puckered white scar on Reyna’s shoulder that had once been an arrow wound, a token from the Titan War.

“I’m my mother’s daughter.”

“I take after my father,” Calypso says, staring out at the sea. “I’ve never been sure if that’s a good thing or not.”

Reyna thinks about Atlas holding up the sky. She’d seen him once briefly during the fighting. He and Calypso have the same pained, dark eyes.

*****

She and Calypso take to watching the sunset together. Scipio joins them, splashing in the shallow surf like a foal again. His grandfather is Neptune, Reyna remembers. That makes them second cousins, which is odd to think. His love of the sea makes sense, from that perspective.

Calypso, if she has done her calculations right, is her first cousin twice removed and also her second cousin once removed. Family is complicated, even more so for demigods.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Family,” Reyna answers honestly. “And the ocean.”

“Two different traps.”

Reyna glances at Calypso. “You’re angry,” she says, almost surprised by the fact. The Titaness’s weary acceptance of her fate had seemed unshakable, but the bitterness in her voice now is unmistakable. 

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Reyna has never been good with feelings given how firmly committed she is to repressing her own, but Calypso has been alone for a long time. She might want someone to talk to that wasn’t a migratory bird or an invisible servant.

Calypso leans her head on Reyna’s shoulder, her long hair concealing the scars from the gryphons’ claws. “You’re just as trapped as I am, but it doesn’t seem to bother you.”

Reyna thinks about this. “I’m not trapped,” she says finally. “I never have been. That might be the only good thing about being a mortal hero.”

“You think death is an escape?” Calypso asks.

Now Reyna shrugs the shoulder Calypso’s head isn’t resting on. “Compared to some things? Yes. I’m grateful to be alive,” she adds hastily, seeing the stormy look on the Titaness’s face. “I don’t want to die. I never have. After everything I’ve done, I know where I’m going, and it won’t be pleasant. It will be somewhere else though.”

“You’re a child,” says Calypso. “Hades isn’t kind, but he’s merciful. Whatever you’ve done, I don’t think he’ll hold it against you.”

“I’ve killed. In battle. Self-defense. Cold-blood, even. Some things are forgivable. Others aren’t.”

Calypso considers this. “I think,” she says slowly. “That you are a weapon, not a soldier. And a weapon cannot be held responsible for the damage it inflicts.”

“And we’re back to blaming the gods,” Reyna says, but she’s smiling. “A well-loved Roman pastime.”

“Greek too,” Calypso agrees, and they stay like that until well after the stars rise. When they return to Calypso’s home, they sleep back-to-back in the same bed.

*****

Minutes or months later, Calypso says, “I don’t love you.”

Reyna keeps grooming Scipio. She's gentle because she knows his scars ache. Hers do too. “Okay,” she says, and she’s not sure why, but that hurts a little.

Calypso huffs. “I didn’t mean it like that. I care about you. We’re friends, and you mean something to me. I meant, well. All of the others, they only left after I loved them. Romantically. I think I need to love you in order to let you leave.”

“You can’t force feelings that aren’t there,” Reyna tells her, slightly mollified. “I wouldn’t want you to. And anyway, the gods have to let me go eventually if they want to stop Gaea from rising.”

“The gods are stubborn,” Calypso says. “Tell me about yourself. Everything. I want to help you. I want to love you. I might be stuck here, but you don’t have to be.”

“I’m not very lovable,” Reyna warns. “Even Venus says so.”

“Try me.” And Calypso looks so defiant standing there barefoot, her dark eyes blazing, that Reyna does.

Reyna’s life has been short and violent. Still, the story takes time to tell. Her father, whose spirit never escaped from the desert, whose anger Reyna cut through with a sword. Her mother, who she had never met. The years she and Hylla spent serving Circe, followed by months of captivity by vengeful pirates. She tells Calypso about the night she and Hylla drugged the entire pirate crew and cut their throats one by one. About the former spa attendants, finally free, but unable to look at each other without painful memories. She tells her how they scattered in the wind as if their pasts were something they could outrun. She talks about arriving in the United States, separating from Hylla, and then fighting her way across the country to Camp Jupiter. She tells of quests, political maneuvering, and the war with the Titans. She ends with the story of the Athena Parthenos, a last-ditch effort to save the world derailed by the claws of a flock of gryphons.

By the end of her tale, her hands are shaking, and she feels faint in a way that distantly registers as a panic attack. Calypso doesn’t say anything. She hums a melody somehow both strange and familiar until Reyna’s breathing eases.

“Sorry,” Reyna says when she can make herself speak again. “I haven’t—I don’t talk about any of this much.” She doesn’t look at Calypso, afraid that she’ll see pity or disgust on the other woman’s face.

Calypso is quiet for a moment longer, then gives Reyna’s hand a gentle squeeze. “You might be the bravest hero I’ve ever met.”

This startles Reyna into looking at her. “I’m a terrible Roman,” she protests. “I killed my father and those other men—there’s no honor or glory or bravery in killing someone who can’t fight back.”

“You’re a good person,” Calypso corrects. “And sometimes there’s no honor or glory in life, only survival. That’s brave, and that’s enough.”

*****

Eons or seconds later, Reyna kisses Calypso over a driftwood bonfire on the beach. Her hair looks silver in the moonlight, but it feels like silk when Reyna tangles her hands in it. Calypso kisses her back and Reyna thinks, just for a moment, that she could stay like this forever.

Sand crunches and she turns, still half-expecting monsters around every corner. Instead, it’s a small raft that the waves have pushed up on the beach. Reyna feels sick at the sight of it. There are a million things she would rather fight. She’s good at fighting, and up until now, she’s been good at leaving. This time is different though. 

“I don’t want to go,” she says.

“You have to though,” Calypso tells her. “You have to.”

She throws together a pack of clothes and supplies while Calypso helps and Scipio watches. Calypso is right. If Gaea rises, there won’t be a forever. There won’t even be a present moment. She has to leave. She has to get to Greece.

They follow her back down to the beach, Titaness and pegasus both.

“I’ll come back,” Reyna promises. “For both of you.”

“No man ever finds this place twice,” Calypso tells her.

“It’s a good thing I’m not a man then, isn’t it?” Reyna asks. Before she can change her mind, she throws her arms around Scipio’s neck, kisses Calypso one last time, and boards the raft. “I’ll be back,” she repeats. “I swear it. On the River Styx, even.”

Thunder rolls despite the cloudless night sky, and the waves carry her tiny raft out to sea.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi to me on [Tumblr](https://peonyprice.tumblr.com/).


End file.
